It started with a solar boom, many small home scale solar roofs popping up everywhere. Australia has a free trade agreement with much of the world, including China, and solar panels have literally dropped to 1/50th of the price they were in 1990 ($10/W to $0.2/W today). A shout out to the work that was done to establish dynamic grid pricing too.
Anyway that caused power prices to reliably go negative during the day as the solar boom led to too much energy being produced. So everyone started buying batteries (you can even get live feed in/out pricing as a consumer). In fact the government even today will pay you a $3000 subsidy to go install a battery. This is in a country where people can buy cheap batteries with no tariffs (free trade's amazing, seriously!). So everyone who could started doing it. For those in apartments etc. that couldn't easily install solar and batteries they won too since the entire power grid is now half the price.
Another consequence of all this, aside from the cheap power prices during a datacenter boom and Hormuz blockade is that fossil fuel usage is plummeting. Particularly gas https://ieefa.org/resources/slump-eastern-australia-gas-dema... . No need for a gas peak power plant when the grid is packed with batteries. Which is helpful since one of the main issues with the current blockade is a lack of gas globally.
The subsidy was closer to 70%, and in my case I was paid the equivalent of about 10 years of free electricity for a battery with a 10-year warranty. In total somewhere around 5-7 billion AUD was paid out (not yet public) - the wholesale market for comparison is around $16B AUD annually. Personally, I would have preferred it was used to build grid scale storage instead of funneling tax money to the relatively wealthy (myself included). Given the extreme volatility of power prices, a figure such as '47% decline' should be taken with a grain of salt - but power prices are certainly a bit lower than last year.
> Personally, I would have preferred it was used to build grid scale storage instead of funneling tax money to the relatively wealthy (myself included).
I am generally sympathetic to this POV but I think for solar and batteries actually I end up leaning the other way. Solar PV scales appropriately for home owners unlike wind or indeed any conventional generation and both solar and batteries change how their owners feel about this so that you end up with people who have "skin in the game" in a way they didn't have when it was a BESS install six miles away they saw on TV once and have never thought about since.
The program has so far spent $2.5bn, and installed 11GWh. That's just the cost of the subsidy (~30% discount), not the cost of what home owners tipped in.
Utility scale batteries are now at ~$66m/GWh, or about ~$726m equivalent.
It does not make sense for everyone to be doing a bespoke installation inside their own home. It is ridiculously inefficient.
We are a society. We don't build our own roads, water, grid, schools, hospitals. Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources? (A: failure of governance)
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I agree 100%, this is one of the most inequitable government policies I've ever seen in this country. The numbers are much worse than you make out. The program has spent more than 2.5bn (the projected figure) and we don't know yet how much. The subsidy was closer to 70% for a typical large battery install. The government's own gen cost report would have put grid storage 1.5x ahead on ROI.
Note that figures like $66m/GWh are projected costs based on projects starting today, not coming online today. They may not include 'balance of plant'. For better comparison you would have to look at the financials of recently commissioned storage.
I've tried to be as charitable on both sides. As you note the real subsidy is higher, but the owner contributions are still high, and the projected cost of the program is now closer to 7.5Bn.
It's pure middle-class welfare.
Fair points, but you are glossing over important issues:
1. You are using the current point-in-time cost for batteries as compared to a subsidy spent over years while battery costs were dropping.
2. You do not include transmission upgrades and costs to distribute energy from centralized batteries.
3. You ignore the benefits and efficiencies of having generation and batteries distributed and close to the source of demand. It also increases resilience of the grid.
4. You assume the political will was there for government and taxpayers to bear the full cost burden of development of the batteries.
My neighbour has a battery installation because where I live they subsidise both - the panels and the battery. In the event of a power outage he can keep running his house for ~3 days if being somewhat frugal with consumption.
And the battery thing even looks kind of neat.
Not all inneficiencies are bad. If the cost to build ridiculously redundant systems is low enough, the system overall is more robust to black swan events than any central planner could ever be.
Installing on people’s houses isn’t just about install costs (the numbers for which above I highly doubt). There’s a huge additional benefit, and cost reducing factor, that comes from installing storage where grid connection already exists. Instead of building out battery farms in the desert and piping the power into urban centers over cables like a power plant, you can install capacity and run it essentially p2p. This is a big deal.
I’ll add that we’re not DIYing this. Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. Also, though I’m not sure how it works outside the US, the government doesn’t build the grid. Energy providers and utilities are also companies.
We already have the "power pipes", from the power plants.
> Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. A couple of electricians doing 20kWh (average install size) once per day, with an individual inverter, gateways, etc. is not at scale, by any means of the word.
There was an article a few years back about how homeowners in Hawaii were buying solar panels to try to get cheaper power.
Then the local power company realized that as well and started shifting to solar with the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.
Which translates to "the local power company was knowingly using ineficient sources to steal from their clients, until their clients did something about it and forced them be efficient".
Decentralization might be dollar-inefficient, but brings resiliency and redundancy to the system. The whole internet infrastructure would be probably cheaper with more centralization. Data backups are also ridiculously innefficient dollar-wise.
Sort of. While not really mainstream, there are private roads (and long driveways), wells, and a (limited) amount of home-schooling. Not hospitals obviously as that requires specialized training and equipment.
That’s great value for money! Even with gas peaked plants that would cost roughly $10 billion in the US. They should massively expand this program.
Honestly this seems like a pretty good efficiency multiplier for a distributed vs. centralized solution at that scale!
There are still advantages to distributed power generation beyond overcoming governance failures—- lie somewhere in between and can increase resilience in the face of more severe and unpredictable climate events.
The subsidy has the effect of prompting the wealthiest consumers to spend around 2.25x the amount of subsidy on battery installations while reducing the load on the grid, lowering prices for all grid users.
Investing in more grid power would require additional grid capacity which would raise the price for all grid users, and with cheap renewables that would be an increasing amount of power bills.
Cost is never the only factor though. Being energy independent and self-sufficient feels awesome. Also whole house backup rocks, together with a smart app showing and optimizing your energy usage.
Do you have some citation to back those numbers up?
Final numbers are not known yet. The Australian government's own 'Gencost' report put grid vs home based storage at 2x as efficient. In this subsidy program, the ratio of private to public money per a battery is about 1:2 (ie 70% subsidy). It was in my own case. Therefore, we would have had more battery storage if the government had just built grid storage.
Having your own battery + inverter setup dramatically reduces the ability for the grid utility to screw you over.
Everyone I know has had that happen at one time or another, and it’s extremely common to want home battery just for the degree of ‘power sovereignity’ it grants you.
It says the subsidy is 30%. You just said it's 70% and that it's 50% in the same sentence. Surely you can give one link to something that backs up anything you said.
> Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources?
Because government is failing to address these issues?
Back in Trumpistan we had some storms roll through my area the other day. Power has been out for some (not me, thankfully) for a couple of days in a major metro. It was a bad storm and I do not fault the crews who are doing hard work out there repairing everything and it takes time.
But what the hell are you supposed to do when the power goes out and it takes a few days to get turned back on? Well, spend $10,000 - $20,000 and install your own backup power. Is it inefficient? Sure! Does that matter? Absolutely not.
Yep. Here in Colorado I installed two powerwalls moderately subsidized by the electricity company. It’s not going to save me meaningful amounts of money even in the long term and I would much rather see energy issues solved at a societal level. But our electricity provider is just unable to reliably keep the lights on through winter and wildfire season, I.e. most of the year. Since installing the batteries a couple years ago our home has stayed warm and lit through two multi-day outages when neighbors have had to go stay in a hotel.
This isn't a federal government issue in the US. Local and state governments dropped the ball here. No one wants to pay what it costs to bury power lines in most locales, and we have a ton of byzantine regulations that make it slow and expensive to add generation capacity.
What are you going to do when winds rip the solar panels off your roof, or drop a big tree branch on them? Who will you call to repair it? Who will pay for it? How many days will it take? Have fun.
} What are you going to do when winds rip the solar panels off your roof, or drop a big tree branch on them? Who will you call to repair it? Who will pay for it?
How is that different than any other weather related house damage? You'd call your insurance company and a licensed contractor.
Assuming the house is habitable, you'd still have grid power, or if not you'd move temporarily while repairs took place.
> Who will you call to repair it?
Solar installer
> Who will pay for it?
Homeowner or insurance.
> How many days will it take?
Depends on the availability of installers.
I don't know why this is some gotcha. How many times have you had a storm rip your roof off and take down the entire neighborhood's grid? And if that happened would you still live in your house or find temporary accomodation?
Is this not free market capitalism?
Domestic electricity was too expensive (and I’m assuming producers would rather pass the costs onto consumers rather than spend their own money and build solar/battery plants themselves), so individuals with capital did the cost-benefit analysis and determined that installing solar is cheaper in the long term.
This drove the price of electricity down during the day, causing the cost-benefit of home-scale batteries to become positive over a reasonable timescale. Thus, people with capital invested money for a positive ROI over a medium term!
The government subsidies level the playing field so it’s not only the upper-class that can benefit from this phenomenon - they are providing equity, not equality. And, cutting out all the middle management waste of the large utility companies, meaning Australians get more electricity for their buck.
Modern capitalism is what failed here. The Australian power providers should’ve gone down this route, but (I’m assuming) shareholders would be upset about ROI on the scale of 5-20 years. Homeowners are more reasonable.
No. The modern grid has little relation to capitalism. There is some private ownership, but there are massive government barriers to entry and massive regulation of the system.
I've long thought that any country should buy solar panels from any other country that's crazy enough to sell them to you at a subsidized price. It's not like buying oil; once you have the panels, that energy independence belongs to you.
As ever, Volts did a really good episode on this:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-rooftop-solar-power-as
Worth a listen, both to learn about how ridiculous the US situation is, and just how good the "news" of abundant solar is.
David Roberts does not have an EE degree and misunderstands anything related to power system operations. Great for positive vibes and LCOE parading tho.
> David Roberts does not have an EE degree
Elon Musk doesn't have an automotive or aeronautical engineering degree. People can understand work they don't have a degree in.
> misunderstands anything related to power system operations
Do you have some examples?
You could try using arguments instead of an appeal to authority fallacy?
What does "LCOE" stand for?
Levelized cost of electricity. All the costs that go into producing from a given source (capex and opex) divided by the total power generated.
Perhaps Low Cost Of Electricity?
Your sibling comment is right. It stands for Levelized Cost Of Electricity.
elaborate
I'm way less skeptical of Roberts than the parent commenter appears to be, but IMO he is more of a policy person than an engineering person. I still find the podcast very useful, with this lens in mind. There are other podcasts that get deeper into the engineering substance, and it's totally ok for different things to have different emphases.
> The government has moved to make use of this surplus solar energy, including by offering free power in the early afternoon to homeowners in Queensland, New South Wales, and South Australia, regardless of whether they have solar panels on their roof or not. The goal is to spur more consumers to run appliances or charge electric vehicles during this window.
Taking the term "1st world problems" to new heights!
You pay a higher daily supply charge and more per kWh outside this window so it's more like free (conditions apply)
The supply charge is 6% higher for the Solar Sharer plan, while the peak rate is 92% higher. Solar Sharer’s peak rate is almost double the flat rate. The off-peak rate is 17% lower than the flat rate.
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/solar-sharer-plans-compa...
Free as in kids eat free
The electricity is "free" because the energy generation is highest at noon (sun is at its zenith), and the population is at the work (low demand for residential electricity). So there is an oversupply of energy at that point. Just like there is an under supply of (solar) electricity at night time when people are using lights, watching tv and eating dinner but the sun isn't shining.
Some of that will be electricity usage that otherwise wouldn't happen, but a lot of it will be shifting load from times where electricity is carbon-intensive to produce to times where there is a surplus that would otherwise go to waste
cause they have massive operational issues induced by effectively must-run oversupply that has increased costs for both ratepayers (and sometimes shifted to the taxpayer to hide costs).
And then try to fix those problems with populist TOU rate magic (they won't be fixed), and bills continue to rise!! But hey, LMPs are down LOLOLOLOL
you're gonna have to expain that to me.
so cheaper 'leccy prices are bad? or that this upfront cost to get batteries installed are bad? even though long term costs will be dropping?
I mean whats the cost of 30% of 500k batteries compared to creating a new peaker genny or five?
Use EVs as energy storage. Millions of EVs form an energy reservoir. 20% of solar is curtailed now and q lot more in future, instead charge EVs. Pay the EV owners because they are creating a storage layer with their capital and power prices go negative hundreds of millions of times every year. No need of home batteries.
In Australia people do both. We don't have V2G yet, but EVs plugged in at home overnight with L1 charging can get charged by the home battery that was charged up during the day by the PV on the roof.
The solar PV and now storage rollouts in Australia have been one of the best government investments in public infrastructure in my lifetime here.
The more we electrify, the less reliant we are on the crude -> foreign refineries -> imported/distributed fuel risk.
Harvesting solar power is an awesome thing to do both at home and utility level.
PV and wind utility installations are being built with storage co-located, there are companies building synthetic condensers to maintain the grid stability and the job of frequency support is now done mostly by batteries, not gas.
We need to make electricity basically "too cheap to meter" and electrify our primary industries, mining and agriculture.
When I looked into it it didn't make sense to use an EV as a solar battery, the chemistry isn't made for high cycle counts compared to regular home/solar batteries.
You looked wrong. These batteries can do 100,000 charge-discharge cycles while retaining 80% of their capacity.
1. A couple orders of magnitude more people own homes than EVs; 2. EVs already are used as energy storage, but the thing about EVs is people want to use that energy to yknow, drive them.
That's why paying EV owners is th right incentive. All new cars will be EVs. In 20 years, all cars are EVs.
Agreed. V2G is actually one of the best DER strats out there. The EVs are already purchased, the batteries and PCS are already configured for bidirectional flow in most brands. Coordination/visibility problem remains at Dx level, but actually worth the investment.
The issue here is that EVs tend to be charged when the sun is down. When sun is up you tend to be at work or driving. The surplus power is coming from solar.
EVs are parked 95% of the time. If it's parked, it can be charged. Work places also have electricity.
>Work places also have electricity.
Only households can access the free electricity window. If you're not on a free plan you can get reduced rates during the peak window but business accounts aren't allowed to access those either.
but you're assuming that work provides parking. Its not a given, plus whats in it for the drivers?
plug my car in, it might be full, it might be empty, either way its racking up the charge cycles for no direct benefit for me.
Batteries on a house makes a better sell for customers, and also targets the problem of both over supply and over consumption at source.
Depends. residential fleets v commercial fleets. different behaviours.
Even most residential batts that get plugged in when they get home typically have SOC >40% (depending on jurisidiction).
surely its possible to invent a "plug in road" system, then cars could charge (at least on highways etc) even when driving. I had this thought ages back when EVs first came out, to tackle the problem of long charge times when doing cross country road trips.
You could run a line overhead on pylons and put a pick up on a pole on the cars.
A smaller version of these things: https://sandtoft.org/wp/
You could combine the best of dodgem cars with drone nets by encasing all the highways in electrified wiring.
Some people drive as if they're in dodgem cars as it is.
On today's episode of "HNer's totally realistic and not deluded idea"...
I imagine this would make road repair even more common, intensive, and disruptive than it already is?
California is also adding a lot of battery storage… but why are electricity prices falling in Australia and not in CA? Are they outpacing us?
"Energy Minister Chris Bowen said that Australia now has more home batteries than the United States, which has a population 12 times larger."
Yes.
This whole thing started because of some power pylons got destroyed and electricity was not restored for about a year right?
Not quite. It was already starting, but the Federal government at the time was very anti RE.
South Australia had a single interconnect to the rest of the Australian Energy Market that covers the states except for WA and Northern Territory.
There was a big storm that took out an interstate interconnect and the voltage spike caused all the other generators to disconnect to protect themselves.
Then Elon promised to build utility storage in 6 months or the state would get it for free.
That was the Hornsby battery which is mainly used for Frequency services (basically when supply/demand fluctuates, it keeps things stable).
That used to be done by gas plants, but the battery saved a large chunk of its cost in the first year by being able to switch on much faster.
I put 7.3kw of panels on our roof for $0 of our money thanks to a $5k rebate and $8k interest free loan. It makes 7.2Mwh of power a calendar year, which would cost $1000 if we had to pay for it.
So for 8 years we pay the loan instead of for the power, then we get -25 years of $1000 a year in our pockets. The price of power is also pre approved to increase a minimum of 5% a year every year here, so the savings will be more than that.
Right now we get a 1:1 credit for anything we put into the grid. If and when that changes I’ll get a battery.
The kicker? We’re in Canada in a tight valley where it snows a ton. If it works here…
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so in other words, heavily subsidize another technology (introducing cost shifts onto non-adopters, typically poorer people) to try and solve operational problems directly caused by oversubsidizing rooftop solar (another regressive cost-shift and extremely inefficient cost allocation relative to tx-connected solar) by bringing down wholesale prices (already a minority of the utility bill).
Fixed costs, the majority of the utility bill, continue to increase. But hey, LMPs (something residential tarriffs are not as exposed to) are lower!!! LMFAO
Wholesale power is ~37% of the customer bills.
The other costs are the "poles and wires" distribution network and the HV transmission network.
The government is also building out the transmission network to various renewable energy zones, which has the added benefit of making the transmission network more resilient.
With large coal plants, the network was only one interconnector failure from blacking out a state (as happened to South Australia).
Now there is a much better network of interconnected transmission across the entire east and south coast of Australia, covering something like 80% of the population.
The government just bailed out an aluminium smelter that was going to close because of the increased cost of power because it was relying on an old coal plant. Now that will be replaced with renewables.
So we get the benefit of the continued operation of the smelter, as well as the build out of replacement generation for the old coal plants at EOL that will be closed by 2030.
I think you could use more citations.
The South Australia blackout was not caused by coal or renewables or lack of interconnectors. If there had been zero interconnects (the local grid was self-sufficient) it wouldn't have happened! The primary cause of the extended blackout was simply a lack of readiness/contingency planning/compliance particularly at several large windfarms. See wiki article.
Coal is generally cheaper for baseload power like an aluminum smelter, even though solar is cheaper during the day. Firming with wind/battery is not yet competitive but is getting very close and is at the point where building new coal power plants is not viable. Refer to gencost report. However, replacing such a large load with brand new renewable capacity is almost certainly more expensive than simply continuing to burn coal, particularly when factoring in the grid upgrades required to make such a transition.
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If you read the article, most of the decline in gas consumption in Australia is from changes in industrial usage. Residential demand is only down by 6% and part of that is likely due to the effective ban on gas in new residential construction which started in 2023 in Victoria. Prior to 2023 residential gas usage was increasing.
A 50% price decline doesn't imply there's 50% less demand for petroleum. If 6% less demand is all the margin consumers need to get their supply, then price can drop quickly. It's all in the margins.
It would be useful to know if the industrial use is factories replacing their use with other sources (e.g. I have read that food manufacture is switching to electricity in Denmark, although it can be held up waiting for a grid connection if there's a data centre ahead of it).
Or, did they improve their efficiency.
Or, have they closed.
It has a whole section on the impact of power policy though and 15% of power mix to 7% for gas is significant. Coals fall is notable too.
Australia never had much residential gas usage. Mr he very vast majority of residential homes don’t even have gas. No need for a furnace.